By 1945, the Allies had pushed the Germans back to Germany and were going from town to town, finishing up the war. But even in the war’s final stage, the American army was often outmanned and outgunned, and in the heart of Germany, the Nazis commanded fanatical devotion. In the first scenes of Fury, a new WWII film directed by David Ayer, we see a field of bodies and burned out tanks; a truck moving through the murk, piled high with American corpses; German children hanging from lamp posts with signs around their necks: “I was too cowardly to fight for Germany.”

Into this hellscape comes Norman (Logan Lerman), a baby-faced army typist who’s never held a gun. Pulled from his desk job to replenish the front line, Norman joins the war-hardened crew of the “Fury,” a tank that’s been killing Nazis prolifically since North Africa. The start of the film questions how anyone can do the crew’s job, wholesale butchery in fields of gore. For Norman, the answer to this question is Wardaddy (Brad Pitt), the revered commander of the tank. Violent at first, but increasingly paternal, Wardaddy teaches Norman to do an undoable job—to kill, and to see some noble purpose in that act. Wardaddy is unassailable, ruthless, stern, and virulent in his hatred for the SS.

Fury soon gives up these moral questions—as Norman must—and encourages us to take pleasure in the slaughter of faceless SS hordes. As the odds against the tank crew grow and suspense heightens, we can no longer question the war. Our sympathies lie inside the “Fury,” in the effort to be a hero in a resolutely unheroic world. The other members of the crew (Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal) give strong performances: rough, rude, proud, coarse, fiercely devoted to Wardaddy and, ultimately, to Norman as well. “Best job ever,” they all say before battle. The comradeship in the face of death is almost tender. The heart of the movie is Lerman and Pitt; their characters are almost too virtuous to accept, but they portray the men believably with the occasional angry tremor or frightened glance. Fury is a war film with a beating heart. There’s gripping suspense in the combat scenes, but for this movie and for this war, the world is in that tank: five men knee deep in death fighting to feel some hope, some calling when the world is fighting back with better guns.